According to District Dispatch “reforms to the National Security Agency’s massive … surveillance program may soon be underway. For the first time ever, the surveillance reform debate can be enjoined in all branches of government.

“The District Court ruling is the first time that a court or government agency has questioned the constitutionality of the surveillance program since news of the NSA phone collecting program leaked in June,” said American Library Association President Barbara Stripling. “While we applaud the Court’s ruling that the program is unconstitutional, we know that more work needs to be done. We continue to encourage library supporters to support the USA Freedom Act…”

The Verge reports that “the National Library of Norway is digitizing all the books in its collection, processing the text to make it searchable, and making them available to read online.

It’s similar to the mass digitization efforts in the UK and Finland but Norway has taken the extra step of making agreements with many publishers to allow anyone with a Norway IP address to access copyrighted material.

According to Information Today “UNESCOintroduced an open access (OA) repository that makes more than 300 online books, reports, and articles in about 12 languages freely available on UNESCO’s website. It operates under a new Creative Commonsopen licensing system for intergovernmental agencies. Each new UNESCO publication will be released with one of the new Creative Commons licenses and will be integrated into the OA repository.

Information Today also notes that “Northern Light launched Listen… from Northern Light, a research portal that tracks information technology (IT) analysts’ posts on blogs, Twitter, and SlideShare. It offers a single point of access to 1.5 million posts by more than 2,000 analysts at 200-plus IT industry research firms…

The portal offers alerts on companies or topics for easy monitoring. It is integrated with Northern Light Business News, which searches 5,000 business-focused sources, white papers from 600 IT products and services companies, and a calendar of IT analyst events featuring more than 1,000 conferences, webinars, and podcasts…”

“Brill and Semantico are proud to announce the launch of BrillOnline Discovery, which offers users the option to search across all of Brill’s online resources from one central place. BrillOnline Discovery uses the Scolaris Linking Hub technology developed by Semantico. This enables federated search increased discoverability across the family of Brill platforms (BrillOnline Primary Sources, BrillOnline Books and Journals, BrillOnline Reference Works and BrillOnline Bibliographies).

A multi-platform publisher like Brill faces challenges in communicating the wealth of online information to users. With over 150 reference works and primary source collections, 200 journals and 4000 e-books the challenge is big. The number of visitors to Brill’s online resources increases every month, which is an extra incentive for Brill to continue to invest in and improve user experience…”

According to this press release the “exponential growth in assignments has led to more than 7 million names receiving the ISO-certified International Standard Name Identifier known as “ISNI“. Published in early 2012, the standard applies a unique 16-digit code to public identities, providing a single identifier that can be leveraged across many applications, syncing alternate or disparate spellings of the same name, and eliminating confusion when names are alike. Bowker, an affiliated business of ProQuest and a registration agency for the standard, tracks assignments and usage of ISNIs…”

GalleyCat also reports that “EBook subscription service Scribd has signed a deal with indie eBook distributor Smashwords to bring its catalog of more than 225,000 eBooks into the Scribd subscription library. Smashwords books are already available through eBook subscription service Oyster…”

According to Publishing Executive “articles submitted to BioMed Central, Chemistry Central, and SpringerOpen journals from 03 February 2014 onwards will be subject to the newCC-BY 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution license. This also applies to open access articles published in the majority of Springer’s subscription-based journals using the Open Choiceoption. The new license is more digital-friendly, and includes a simplified attribution requirement…”